SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the podcast of Christ Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.
SPEAKER_00: Join us as we dive into this week's sermon that challenges our hearts and minds to grow closer to Christ.
SPEAKER_00: We pray that your heart is inspired and transformed by God's Word.
SPEAKER_01: Our scripture reading this morning comes from Second Corinthians chapter seven verses two through sixteen.
SPEAKER_01: Make room in your hearts for us.
SPEAKER_01: We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have taken advantage of no one.
SPEAKER_01: I do not say this to condemn you, for I said before that you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together.
SPEAKER_01: I am acting with great boldness toward you, I have great pride in you, I am filled with comfort.
SPEAKER_01: In all our affliction I am overflowing with joy, for even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn, fighting without and fear within.
SPEAKER_01: But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the comfort with which he was comforted by you, as he told us of your longing, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced still more.
SPEAKER_01: For even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it, though I did regret it, for I see that that letter grieved you, though only for a while.
SPEAKER_01: As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting, for you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us.
SPEAKER_01: For godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.
SPEAKER_01: For see what eager what earnestness this godly grief has produced in you, but also what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what longing, what zeal, what punishment?
SPEAKER_01: At every point you have proved yourselves innocent in the matter.
SPEAKER_01: So although I wrote to you, it was not for the sake of the one who did the wrong, nor for the sake of the one who suffered the wrong, but in order that your earnestness for us might be revealed to you in the sight of God.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore we are comforted.
SPEAKER_01: And besides our own comfort, we rejoice still more at the joy of Titus, because his spirit has been refreshed by you all.
SPEAKER_01: For whatever boast I made to him about you, I was not put to shame.
SPEAKER_01: But just as everything we said to you was true, so also our boasting before Titus is proved true, and his affection for you is even greater, as he remembers the obedience of you all, how you received him with fear and trembling.
SPEAKER_01: I rejoice, because I have complete confidence in you.
SPEAKER_01: This is the word of God for the people of God.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_03: Amen and amen.
SPEAKER_03: I greet you this morning in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_03: My name is Paul Lawler, and I have the honor of serving as a senior pastor of Christ Methodists.
SPEAKER_03: We welcome you today.
SPEAKER_03: I have said from time to time that I think our mission's pastor Nathan Cook has a prophetic voice to the church.
SPEAKER_03: And in light of that, uh Nathan has innocently read next week's text rather than today's text, and it's not his fault.
SPEAKER_03: I I've got his I've got his back on this.
SPEAKER_03: You may remember we had guests that we interviewed last Sunday, and I failed to get a memo to Nathan that we needed to shift the sequence of our teaching in Second Corinthians.
SPEAKER_03: So to be faithful to the text, and it's brief but poignant, let me read today's text to you and be comforted that you are fully prepared for next week.
SPEAKER_03: Hear the Word of God, Second Corinthians six, fourteen through seven one.
SPEAKER_03: Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, for what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?
SPEAKER_03: What accord has Christ with Belial?
SPEAKER_03: Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?
SPEAKER_03: What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
SPEAKER_03: For we are the temple of the living God, as God said, I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
SPEAKER_03: Therefore go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.
SPEAKER_03: Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
SPEAKER_03: And Jesus, we pray with the understanding that you said that you not only dwell in heaven, but you dwell with the one who is humble and contrite and trembles at your word.
SPEAKER_03: So we pray that as we continue to worship you through your word, that you would work your grace in us to align us with you.
SPEAKER_03: And we pray it in Jesus' name, Amen.
SPEAKER_03: I want to tell you this morning about a man named David.
SPEAKER_03: It's not his real name.
SPEAKER_03: I'm substituting it just to protect his identity.
SPEAKER_03: But David grew up in the church.
SPEAKER_03: He sang in the youth choir.
SPEAKER_03: Growing up, he attended vacation Bible school every summer.
SPEAKER_03: He could quote John 3.16 before he could ride a bike.
SPEAKER_03: And somewhere, however, in his mid-twenties, David began to make a series of choices, not dramatic choices, not headline grabbing choices, just the kind of choices that were very subtle, incremental, just that kind of just allowed him to drift a bit.
SPEAKER_03: He married someone who did not share his faith, not because he stopped believing, but because he told himself, you know, we're in love, things will work out okay.
SPEAKER_03: He started spending his Sundays watching football instead of attending worship, not because he stopped believing, but because he told himself in his self-talk, God will understand I think I'm basically a good person.
SPEAKER_03: He stopped reading his Bible, not because he stopped believing, but because well, life got busy.
SPEAKER_03: And years later, David sat in my office and with pain in his eyes, he said something like this, Pastor, I'm not sure exactly how I got to where I am.
SPEAKER_03: I never stopped believing, I just stopped being deliberate.
SPEAKER_03: And I want to tell you with all the love in my heart that that's exactly the kind of person the Apostle Paul is addressing in 2 Corinthians 6 and 7.
SPEAKER_03: Not the person who walked away from God in some dramatic fashion, but the believer who drifted, the Christian that stopped being deliberate, the follower of Jesus that got comfortable, slow, creeping compromise that over time cost this person everything that the apostle Paul calls in this section the promises of God.
SPEAKER_03: That's why Paul has been reminding us in this section, and I've been reminding you, don't waste God's grace.
SPEAKER_03: And Paul the apostle knows that that's possible.
SPEAKER_03: He knows that with your one and only life that passes like a vapor, that there are patterns that can get ingrained in you just by cultural influence that will cause you to neglect the grace of God.
SPEAKER_03: Life is short, and yet life has meaning and purpose in God, and we can miss it.
SPEAKER_03: And that's why Paul writes in chapter 6 and 7 with a high decibel level of urgency for the believer.
SPEAKER_03: But this section is also an invitation, a deep, relational, life-giving invitation.
SPEAKER_03: In fact, I've subtitled this message this morning as we talk about being the temple of God, really is a call to come home.
SPEAKER_03: It's a call to come home and to be renewed in your first love of Jesus and to know and rejoice and live into the gift of all of the promises of God.
SPEAKER_03: There are over 7,000 of them in Scripture, but the one that Paul really brings home is the gift of the grace of God empowering you to live for the glory of God.
SPEAKER_03: And so Paul addresses this issue of coming home in three primary areas.
SPEAKER_03: And so he begins with what we would call the image of a yoke.
SPEAKER_03: That is, the matter of the direction of your life predicated upon your closest relationships in your life and how they influence you.
SPEAKER_03: Paul begins with a farming metaphor, and his audience would have immediately, in an agrarian culture, understood this imagery.
SPEAKER_03: A yoke is a wooden beam that is placed over two animals so that the two animals can align their strength and power to plow together.
SPEAKER_03: It's about a shared direction, a shared burden, a shared purpose.
SPEAKER_03: And so, commonsensically, if you yoke an ox and a donkey together, you don't just get inefficiency, you get frustration, you get imbalance, you get harm ultimately.
SPEAKER_03: One pulls stronger, the other pulls differently.
SPEAKER_03: One obeys commands, the other one resists commands, the field suffers, the animals suffer.
SPEAKER_03: And the imagery that Paul's pulling from is actually out of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 22.10, where the Lord gives instruction, very commonsensical, you shall not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.
SPEAKER_03: And the point is not complicated.
SPEAKER_03: Two animals with fundamentally different natures, different strengths, different gaits, when you bind them together, neither of them flourishes.
SPEAKER_03: Nothing gets accomplished that was intended.
SPEAKER_03: So, church family, I would assume most of us, not everybody, but most of us in this sanctuary have a Christian background.
SPEAKER_03: And if you've been a Christian very long, you've heard the verse.
SPEAKER_03: Tech team, could we put the one verse up here?
SPEAKER_03: Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
SPEAKER_03: We've heard this verse, and you've probably heard it applied almost exclusively to marriage.
SPEAKER_03: And with the instruction, do not marry an unbeliever.
SPEAKER_03: And that's true, it absolutely applies here.
SPEAKER_03: But what we fail to miss oftentimes when we read verses like this is that Paul's language is much broader than that.
SPEAKER_03: Paul is implying this image not only to marriage, but to every deep and binding alliance that could be created throughout our lives.
SPEAKER_03: Every relationship, every partnership that takes on a depth of some type of bond in relationship creates entanglements fundamentally, where you potentially could be binding your life to a completely different set of values, a different ultimate allegiance, a different Lord.
SPEAKER_03: And before we go any further, I need to pause and say, hear me carefully on what I'm about I'm about to say, because this is very important because there are persons who do miss, there are persons who do misunderstand, and there are persons who misapply the text.
SPEAKER_03: And I need to address that before we go any further.
SPEAKER_03: Paul is not saying, live in a Christian bubble and never speak to anyone who doesn't go to church or knows Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_03: He is absolutely not saying that.
SPEAKER_03: In fact, Paul clarified that in the book of 1 Corinthians in chapter 5, 9 and 10, where he says, I didn't tell you not to associate with the immoral people of this world, for then you would need to leave the world.
SPEAKER_03: We're all aware as followers of Jesus that you are sent into the world.
SPEAKER_03: We all are missionaries to the world.
SPEAKER_03: And so Paul is not saying do not have friendships with unbelievers.
SPEAKER_03: What he is saying is don't enter into deep, defining, binding alliances where you are bound to a system of values, a set of loyalties, a relationship dynamic that is fundamentally different, a direction than that which represents the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_03: And then if you've got your Bible those open, notice what Paul does next.
SPEAKER_03: He doesn't just give a command, church family.
SPEAKER_03: He asks five rhetorical questions.
SPEAKER_03: And these are not softball questions.
SPEAKER_03: These are, do you see what you're actually dealing with?
SPEAKER_03: questions?
SPEAKER_03: These are the kinds of questions which he asks in order to shake you out of being spiritually asleep.
SPEAKER_03: And he says, What partnership has righteousness with lawlessness?
SPEAKER_03: What fellowship has light with darkness?
SPEAKER_03: What accord has Christ with Belial?
SPEAKER_03: Belial is a name for Satan.
SPEAKER_03: What portion does a believer have with an unbeliever?
SPEAKER_03: What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
SPEAKER_03: And what he's doing here, he's not asking for answers.
SPEAKER_03: He's simply making a rhetorical point with these questions.
SPEAKER_03: He is emphasizing with Holy Spirit emphaticness.
SPEAKER_03: These are not compatible realities.
SPEAKER_03: Light does not negotiate with darkness, it overcomes it.
SPEAKER_03: Righteousness does not partner with lawlessness, it exposes it.
SPEAKER_03: And he's what he's not doing is he's not saying that a Christ follower is superior to anyone.
SPEAKER_03: What he's drawing out is your identity, who and whose you really are.
SPEAKER_03: Because you're a person of light, think about it this way: if you walk into a dark room and you flip on a light switch, the darkness doesn't argue, it disappears.
SPEAKER_03: Why?
SPEAKER_03: Because light and darkness cannot coexist as equals.
SPEAKER_03: One defines the space.
SPEAKER_03: And the Apostle Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is declaring if you belong to Christ, your life is meant to define the space.
SPEAKER_03: If you belong to Christ, your life is meant to be defined by his light, not negotiated with darkness.
SPEAKER_03: Loved ones, there are a thousand examples of this.
SPEAKER_03: Thousands of examples.
SPEAKER_03: If I begin to illustrate this, I would only begin touching the surface.
SPEAKER_03: I think about circumstances I've heard through the years.
SPEAKER_03: I think about the the brother who comes to me years ago, not this church, okay, because this church doesn't have any challenges, just other churches, right?
SPEAKER_03: And this brother comes to me, member of my congregation, Pastor Paul, when we when I get off work at five o'clock, there's a group of guys that all get together and just hang out and have have a drink together.
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, okay.
SPEAKER_03: And then he shares with me that one drink over time led to two, two led to three, and instead of coming home to spend an evening with his wife and kids, that he lingered longer.
SPEAKER_03: And as he lingered longer, the joking got more crass at times.
SPEAKER_03: And then as the joking got more crass, there were times where it became very well, times it became common for the group of guys to just gossip about the people at the office.
SPEAKER_03: And the question you would begin to ask is are they discipling you?
SPEAKER_03: Or are you discipling them?
SPEAKER_03: There are thousand examples, loved one.
SPEAKER_03: Thousands and thousands of examples.
SPEAKER_03: But Paul reminds us here, the apostle, of the image of a yoke.
SPEAKER_03: Come home.
SPEAKER_03: It's a matter of your life's direction.
SPEAKER_03: Come home.
SPEAKER_03: And then he moves to a second image, and it's the image that you and I, we are the temple of the living God.
SPEAKER_03: He raises the stakes and he emphasizes the urgency of followers of Jesus taking action.
SPEAKER_03: He's emphasizing that you're not just influenced by God, you are indwelt by God as a believer.
SPEAKER_03: That's why verse 16 says, We are the temple of the living God.
SPEAKER_03: Now think about that.
SPEAKER_03: Don't let that just pass through your ears.
SPEAKER_03: Think about that deeply in the heart.
SPEAKER_03: God is declaring, I'm not dwelling in a building, I'm not dwelling in a location, I'm not dwelling in a weekly gathering.
SPEAKER_03: I dwell in you.
SPEAKER_03: In you, believer.
SPEAKER_03: He doesn't just visit, he dwells.
SPEAKER_03: And then Paul does something extraordinary.
SPEAKER_03: He reaches back into the Old Testament, and as he does, he declares something that has been true of the people of God for thousands and thousands of years and remains true today.
SPEAKER_03: Verse 16, I will make my dwelling among them.
SPEAKER_03: Old Testament, it was in a tabernacle and a temple.
SPEAKER_03: New Testament, you are that temple.
SPEAKER_03: I will make my dwelling among them, I will walk among them, I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
SPEAKER_03: Loved ones, this is covenant language.
SPEAKER_03: We need to preach and teach on the covenants of Scripture, but that's not for today.
SPEAKER_03: This is covenant language.
SPEAKER_03: This is relationship language.
SPEAKER_03: This is belonging language.
SPEAKER_03: When I was a kid and playing football, I remember there was a penalty that could be called uh now time nowadays, most of the time it's just called a late hit.
SPEAKER_03: But when I was a kid, if if if the tackle had already been made and some somebody runs and piles on, that was called piling on.
SPEAKER_03: Well, the apostle Paul in love piles on here, but this mode is pure, because after he quotes the Old Testament, he then piles on with this.
SPEAKER_03: The Lord says, I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord God Almighty.
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to circle back to that in just a moment.
SPEAKER_03: But what I want you to notice is the spirit in which God is saying he's going to dwell in you.
SPEAKER_03: He is dwelling in you.
SPEAKER_03: I want you to imagine for a moment that you get a phone call and you're discovering that you're about to host a very important guest in your home, and you clean and you rearrange and you make space.
SPEAKER_03: But imagine that the person who calls you expresses they're not coming for a visit, they're coming to move in permanently.
SPEAKER_03: And would you not agree that changes everything?
SPEAKER_03: You don't say, Hey, come to my house, make yourself comfortable around my clutter.
SPEAKER_03: You say, Oh, I've got to make this place worthy of your presence.
SPEAKER_03: Love ones, in this text, God is not withholding his promise from you because you haven't been good enough.
SPEAKER_03: And that's part of what Paul is saying here, because his all his promises have already been spoken, they're already made available to you.
SPEAKER_03: Already on the table, the question Paul is asking is Are you arranging your heart, your life, the cleaning out the clutter to make yourself available to receive the promises of God?
SPEAKER_03: You ever had a dream where you're not sure if you're in a dream state or in your in reality somewhere?
SPEAKER_03: Maybe it's just me.
SPEAKER_03: Years ago, Missy and I, we hadn't been married very long.
SPEAKER_03: And early one morning, I had a dream, but I wasn't totally sure if I was awake or if I was a dream, I was dreaming.
SPEAKER_03: And I dreamed there was a tarantula spider on Missy's face.
SPEAKER_03: And so I'm, you know, naturally, if you think there's a spider on your wife's face and you love her, what do you do?
SPEAKER_03: You knock the spider off.
SPEAKER_03: And so I think I'm awake, but I'm not awake, and I start knocking the spider off, only then to hear this voice go, What are you doing?
SPEAKER_03: What do you why are you hitting me?
SPEAKER_03: What is going on?
SPEAKER_03: And then I say, Well, there's a big spider on your face, which took everything to another level.
SPEAKER_03: She jumps out of bed just frantic.
SPEAKER_02: And you all know that there's a false premise.
SPEAKER_02: There's no spider.
SPEAKER_02: And we're all reacting.
SPEAKER_02: I'm reacting, she's reacting out of that which is really an illusion.
SPEAKER_02: And the truth be told, many of you are living in an illusion.
SPEAKER_02: Wake up and believe what is true.
SPEAKER_02: If you're in Christ, you're the temple of God.
SPEAKER_02: He dwells in you.
SPEAKER_02: It's not an illusion, it's true.
SPEAKER_03: It's what the word of God says about you.
SPEAKER_03: And so, Paul, as he's sharing this, he's saying, Because a holy God dwells in you, clear space in the temple for the one who wants to dwell there.
SPEAKER_03: And then Paul takes us to this third phase where he says, Come out, be separate.
SPEAKER_03: Now, this is a phrase that can make us feel uncomfortable on the front end, but look with me at verse 17 of the first part.
SPEAKER_03: Paul says, Therefore, go out from their midst, be separate from them, says the Lord, touch no unclean thing.
SPEAKER_03: Let's ask a question together.
SPEAKER_03: What does that mean?
SPEAKER_03: Well, first of all, let's go back to what it doesn't mean, what it does not mean.
SPEAKER_03: It does not mean abandoning the world.
SPEAKER_03: That's not the context.
SPEAKER_03: Jesus himself prayed for us in John 17, prayed that we would not be taken out of the world, but we would be protected within it.
SPEAKER_03: He also prayed that we would be salty and full of light, influential around people in the world.
SPEAKER_03: So what it does mean is that we're not to conform to the world and its fallen values.
SPEAKER_03: It means we don't adopt its priorities.
SPEAKER_03: It means that we're not letting people who oppose God define us because we are salty.
SPEAKER_03: A ship is meant to be in the water, but the water is not meant to be in the ship.
SPEAKER_03: The moment the environment outside of us begins to flood the inside, the vessel is in danger.
SPEAKER_03: And Christians are called to live in the world.
SPEAKER_03: But when the world begins to live in us unchecked, then we begin to sink.
SPEAKER_03: Once again, the culture is not supposed to disciple you.
SPEAKER_03: You, as a child of God, are designed to disciple the culture.
SPEAKER_03: And what Paul is sharing here is separation is not about distance.
SPEAKER_03: It's about distinction.
SPEAKER_03: You're different.
SPEAKER_03: Now, note this in the middle of the Apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, in the middle of him sharing with us that we're called to holiness, that's in the text.
SPEAKER_03: God also gives us a promise that changes everything.
SPEAKER_03: And so I shared with you, I was going to circle back in just a moment.
SPEAKER_03: Let's go back to verse 18, where notice the spirit in which the Father is speaking to you this morning from his word.
SPEAKER_03: I will be a father to you.
SPEAKER_03: Think about that, church.
SPEAKER_03: And you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord.
SPEAKER_03: You know what that tells us?
SPEAKER_03: I want to just invite you.
SPEAKER_03: Let this get personal.
SPEAKER_03: That tells us that what we're learning this morning is not coming out of a cold command, it's coming out of a warm relationship.
SPEAKER_03: God's not saying to us, clean yourself up so I'll accept you.
SPEAKER_03: He's saying, because you belong to me, live like you're really my children.
SPEAKER_03: A child in a loving home doesn't obey simply out of fear.
SPEAKER_03: They respond to relationship because they know who they belong to.
SPEAKER_03: When I was a kid, and maybe violated a boundary, maybe I punched my brother when I shouldn't have.
SPEAKER_03: My father, when he would discipline me, sometimes would say things like this.
SPEAKER_03: He would get down on a level, hold me by the shoulders, look me in the eye, and he would say, Son, that's not who we are.
SPEAKER_02: Do you understand what he was doing?
SPEAKER_03: He wasn't just correcting behavior, he was validating identity.
SPEAKER_03: And that's what God is doing with us with this word.
SPEAKER_03: Since he says in verse one, since we have these promises, beloved.
SPEAKER_03: Can we stop right there?
SPEAKER_03: Since we have these promises, beloved, notice that word beloved.
SPEAKER_03: Notice the warm relationship.
SPEAKER_03: Notice that the Father is not speaking to you in the lens of pressuring you.
SPEAKER_02: He's speaking to you in love.
SPEAKER_03: By the way, that's one of the biblical basis for why Pastor Paul calls you loved ones.
SPEAKER_03: It's not my idea.
SPEAKER_03: It's because it's all over the text, it's all over the Bible.
SPEAKER_03: You're loved by your Heavenly Father, your beloved loved ones.
SPEAKER_03: And so, since we have these promises, loved ones, look at the rest of the verse.
SPEAKER_03: Warm relationship.
SPEAKER_03: Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.
SPEAKER_03: And this is where our responsibility meets God in the arms of God's warm grace, his grace.
SPEAKER_03: God provides the promises to transform us.
SPEAKER_03: We pursue how to posture and respond to his love.
SPEAKER_03: Cleanse ourselves doesn't mean that we save ourselves.
SPEAKER_03: It means we cooperate with what God is doing and developing all of us into Christ's likeness.
SPEAKER_03: Holiness is not instant perfection, as we all know, it's an ongoing transformation that undergoes a whole series of iterations as we walk and we grow in Christ.
SPEAKER_03: You know, you could think about it like this.
SPEAKER_03: My wife, Missy, used to restore furniture.
SPEAKER_03: And I'm always aware that she would buy a piece of furniture, and I would go, there's no hope for that piece of furniture.
SPEAKER_03: It's gone.
SPEAKER_03: It's dusty, it's caked with this and that.
SPEAKER_03: And then she would begin to strip the furniture.
SPEAKER_03: And then oftentimes she would work out the dirt and the scratches and the dents, and I would look at it four weeks later.
SPEAKER_03: And that's kind of like us.
SPEAKER_03: When we come to Christ, we got all kinds of scratch and dents and wounds and layers of this and that.
SPEAKER_03: But God's restoring us, He's restoring the image of Jesus in you.
SPEAKER_03: And He invites you and I to participate in the process.
SPEAKER_03: So before we close, let's bring this down to where we live.
SPEAKER_03: First of all, note that what the Holy Spirit has inspired Paul, the apostle, to teach us is that our relationships matter.
SPEAKER_03: People who don't know Christ, our relationships matter because we're on mission.
SPEAKER_03: But our relationships also matter with those that we bond with, that we're closest to.
SPEAKER_03: I remember years ago coaching my kids' sports teams, and there were certain years where I had to fight for my own heart when I was coaching with a coach that was an unbeliever, and I would go, Lord, keep my heart in check.
SPEAKER_03: Is he influencing me?
SPEAKER_03: Or am I influencing him?
SPEAKER_03: Relationships matter, and being properly yoked matters.
SPEAKER_03: Our values, are we adopting the world's definition of success, or are we living into God's definition of success?
SPEAKER_03: Our habits, what are you allowing?
SPEAKER_03: Your mind and your heart, your life to meditate on.
SPEAKER_03: What are those things that are dulling your sensitivities to God?
SPEAKER_03: Compromise.
SPEAKER_03: What are areas where you've blurred lines that really God has made clear?
SPEAKER_03: And I want to lovingly remind you, notice that how this passage is not about legalism.
SPEAKER_03: It's really about alignment.
SPEAKER_02: Aligning your heart with God.
SPEAKER_02: So let me leave you with this.
SPEAKER_03: There's an old story of a lighthouse keeper who was responsible for keeping the light and the lighthouse burning so that ships could pass by safely.
SPEAKER_03: But one night people kept coming to him for oil, for their lamps, for their needs.
SPEAKER_03: And being a people pleaser, he gave some of his oil away.
SPEAKER_03: And by midnight the lighthouse ran out of oil.
SPEAKER_02: The light went out, and ships crashed into the rocks, and people, innocent people, lost their lives.
SPEAKER_02: And it led to a disaster.
SPEAKER_02: Church.
SPEAKER_03: Holiness is not about withdrawing from the Lord.
SPEAKER_03: It's about staying filled with the oil of God's presence so that your light remains strong.
SPEAKER_03: And the Apostle Paul here in this passage, in a spirit of urgency, because he knows that there are certain patterns that can get ingrained into our hearts that will win if we do not give them attention.
SPEAKER_03: Paul here draws a line, but it's not a line to confine you.
SPEAKER_03: It is a line that is designed to refine you in a way that it defines you for the glory of God.
SPEAKER_03: So be mindful, believer.
SPEAKER_03: You are yoked with Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_03: Be mindful that you are the temple of the living God.
SPEAKER_03: Do not live under an illusion.
SPEAKER_03: Do not enable an illusion.
SPEAKER_03: God dwells in you.
SPEAKER_03: You are his sons and his daughters.
SPEAKER_03: So live in a way that reflects who and whose you really are.
SPEAKER_03: Not perfectly, no one will do that, this side of heaven, but intentionally, not out of an earthly fear, but out of a holy reverence for a holy God who calls you his beloved, not to earn his love, but because you already have it.
SPEAKER_02: Since we have these promises, loved ones, let's live into them.
SPEAKER_02: Let's live like it.
SPEAKER_02: In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_02: Amen.
SPEAKER_02: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_02: And so we pray, O God, that every illusion would be pierced with light.
SPEAKER_03: And that Lord, where we have yokes that are not appropriate, we pray, Lord, that this week that we will take steps to move toward you in a healthy direction.
SPEAKER_03: Lord, I I I will address this in prayer, even though I know it's very personal for many in this sanctuary.
SPEAKER_03: I pray, Lord, God, that you would also stir the kind of courage, Holy Spirit fueled courage to take the right steps in light of what you're speaking to us this morning.
SPEAKER_03: Father, I pray that we would live in a way that reflects who you really are, not out of seeking to earn your love, but because you already love us.
SPEAKER_03: And then, Lord, anyone in the sound of my voice that have yet to come to know Christ, I pray, Lord, that you would draw them this morning, move them to a place of repentance of sin and putting their faith in Jesus as the Son of God.
SPEAKER_03: Let them come home.
SPEAKER_03: Draw them home, Lord.
SPEAKER_03: No one comes to the Son unless the Father draws them.
SPEAKER_03: And so we pray, draw to the Son in miracle working power.
SPEAKER_03: And Lord, as you draw to the Son, birth persons into the kingdom, we pray.
SPEAKER_03: In Jesus' name, amen.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the podcast for Christ Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee.
SPEAKER_00: We pray that today's message has inspired and encouraged you in your walk with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: To stay connected with our church community, visit us online at Christchurch Methodists.org.
SPEAKER_00: We hope to see you this upcoming Sunday for worship as we seek to glorify God and make disciples of Jesus Christ all beings.